


Home is the Hunter

by NorroenDyrd



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Alternate Universe - Elder Scrolls Fusion, Crack Treated Seriously, Crossover, Daedric Princes, Flashbacks, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 16:41:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15999221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: I had a random Dragon Age/Elder Scrolls crack crossover idea where, instead of dying at the hand of the mages who wanted him to harvest dragon blood for them, Cassandra's brother Anthony Pentaghast gets transported to Nirn, where it turns out that he is no mere dragon hunter but the Dragonborn, and he does all he can to save the world (and falls for Brand-Shei in the process, because Brand-Shei does need more love)... But then the time comes to pay back his debt to Hermaeus Mora.





	Home is the Hunter

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that this is not the whole story, not yet. It's just a brieft overview of what might have happened to Anthony in Tamriel, which I jotted down before I could forget. I may expand on it in the future, but so far, I hope there is still merit in this as a standalone.

He was very sorry to go. To leave behind his dearest Brand-Shei, this wonderful elf with skin that was as ashen-grey as that of the half-mythical Qunari giants back in Thedas, and a red-eyed gaze that, when the first bitterness faded, would become as warm and entrancing as a sip of spiced wine. The elf who, against all odds, grew to be his best friend, his great love, his everything, a flicker of light in the dismal drabness of Riften (which he eventually took Brand-Shei away from), a constant companion to turn to and lean on during his endless journeys in search of new dragons to slay.  
  
He was sorry to leave behind his Brand-Shei, and the children that they adopted, now so grown, so strong, so independent, their own men and women rather than orphans in threadbare rags cowering under the gale of freezing air and adults’ screams - and their children’s children, also slowly growing into adults, never having known the lonesome and hungry days that their parents once suffered through.  
  
He was sorry to leave behind this land - this odd and wondrous place where he plummeted, through layers upon layers of the Fade after those crazed maleficars accosted him and tossed him into a vortex of broiling, rage-fueled magic . This boundless expanse of colour, from farmland gold and brown to forest green to headspinning, icy mountain blue, which he got a chance explore in a new, mended body, miraculously pieced together to replace the one that the maleficars had melted away. This incredible, impossible new world, so unlike the distant, almost dream-like Thedas of his early years - a world where elves live for hundreds of years and still rule their own realms (something that many of his fellow humans would have found unthinkable); where magic is almost universally embraced and practiced with no Templar supervision (something that took him the longest time to get used to, even as he found himself falling in love with a Telvanni); where there are cat people and lizard people and green-skinned boar-tusked… Orc people, and where the temples preach about eight gods, or even nine (something that sounds almost like a fever dream and yet is very, very real).  
  
He was sorry… And yet, a bargain is a bargain. Oh, how the Chantry would have hated him; how his own, younger self would have hated him, for heeding the rumbling, slow-paced words of a demonic, cloudy mass of eyes and tentacles. But he saved many lives by doing so - and when his time comes; when he is wisened and battle-scarred and grey; when an open book appears on his nightstand, slithering letters forming ever-shifting frames and circles and zigzags upon its pages, each faint rustle like an incoherent whisper, he does not try to run or hide. He says goodbye, and enters Apocrypha. To stay for good.  
  
Out of all the Daedric planes he has visited, this realm, with its sickly green light and grinding, rotating structures that are forever dripping with blackened moisture, is most akin to the Fade as he remembers it. Although, barring the draconic flame that pulses within him, he is no mage, and he never particularly enjoyed meandering about that place when he was still in Thedas (he cannot say ‘still home’ because he is not certain what home even is any longer). And he is not too keen to meander through here, either; Hermaeus Mora’s tentacled minions leave him alone, but the books that float all over the place watch him with rotating eyes embedded with their flapping pages, and the sight of bottomless black waters heaving at his feet makes him nauseous. Still, he has to do something to pass the eternity he is to spend here. Mora sustains him - not through food, but through vials of potions he finds on occasion in grey, clam-shaped coffers - but other than that, he seems to have no use for him. He has… collected him, like he collects all these books, and then left him on the shelf to gather dust (the creature would probably hit it off with his half-forgotten old uncle, who had a similar approach to running the household).  
  
It is unfair, to languish pointlessly away like this; and on some days, he does give in to anger, tossing his Voice in a searing blast of blue or golden flame across the slimy, blinking nothingness, and daring Mora to come out and do… something. Anything. To at least somehow justify him abandoning the mortal realm.  
  
But the nothingness gives no answer, except for more dumb blinking - and so, in order not to go mad, he takes to picking up the pages that cover the ground here like autumn leaves, and to dipping the shard of one of his potion vials in black too, and writing. Writing and writing and writing, till he buries himself in the foliage of his own memories.  
  
Perhaps this is what Mora has been after all along. The reminiscences of the last Dragonborn. The tale of a young man from another world, who was to have been ripped to shreds by some angry mages for refusing to hunt a dragon for some vile purpose - and instead, got sent to a new world, and given a nre purpose, and pointed at new dragons that had to be hunted. For, in some mysterious way that can probably be explained by a vague flourishing gesture, a shrug, and a 'because magic’, generations upon generations of Thedosian dragon slayers had apparently produced what this world, Nirn, needed the most. A worthy Dovahkiin. Or at least, he hopes he has been worthy.  
  
He writes all of this down, detailing every last adventure and misadventure he ever had - and when there are no more memories of Nirn to dig into, he unearthes the memories of Thedas. Pale and worn-down at this point, with many details rubbed off. The massive pyramids that always seemed to block out the horizon of his birth land; his uncle’s musty, eerily quiet home; the name that he answered to back then, before he stuck on a Tevinter-like ending because the folk of Nirn kept mistaking him for an 'Imperial’. Not Antonius - Anthony. His name, once, was Anthony. He recalls it being said, through an awestruck smile and an almost reverent intake of breath, by a little girl with spiky black hair, who would swear she’d rather die than wear a dress.  
  
His… His sister. He had a baby sister, in that distant world - and now, amid the emptiness of Apocrypha, the poignancy with which he missed her during his first days on Nirn hits him in the chest like a riekling spear.  
  
He does not know if time passes any differently in the two worlds. Is she old and grey already, endless planes away from him; has she been dead for centuries, entombed in a pyramid of her own, venerated as a dragon huntress of legend? Or is she still frozen in that horrible moment, watching her brother dissolve into a gory mess?  
  
'It’s all right, Cassie,’ he whispers, smiling into nothingness. 'I didn’t die… Not really… I was just… misplaced’.  
  
A book floats by him, as books do here; he scans its cover out of the corner of his eye, and turns away, not really registering the details. But perhaps, one day - or whatever passes for units of time measurement in Apocrypha - the book will float into his field of view again, and he will realize that, while its front cover pictures a human lady knight that one might encounter in Thedas and Nirn alike, the back, where the author’s portrait goes, depicts a dwarf. And dwarves do not exist on Nirn - have not for millennia. This book is from another world (gods know… or Maker knows… how Mora got his tentacles on it) - and as many of Apocrypha’s volumes tend to act as gateways, perhaps one day, it will occur to the last Dragonborn to touch it. To open the pages, and embark on a new journey - to a place that might have been his home.


End file.
